Grit Lab Report

Hi Yuka,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 4: I have an interest I’m actively pursuing, voluntarily devoting more than 3 hours of “free time” each week .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were self-direction, benevolence, and achievement.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was openness.

You said your top three talents were analytic, verbal, and artistic / spatial.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you felt totally clear about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to senior design project .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Finish my project .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Helping my teammates .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Procrastination .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I feel like procrastinating, I recheck my to-do list .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt sad when receiving critical feedback, and sad when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling an extreme amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being recruiting .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .

In one word, you said it made you feel Happy .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

happiness is something that comes from pursuing a goal and everything seems to be going well, and professional happiness comes from a job where you can constantly set new goals
1. happiness brings grit and grit brings happiness. 2. enjoyable and interesting don't always go together.
When you know more about something, it's easier to learn about it.
Goal fusion can make the tedious tasks more interesting when the higher goal is aligned
plans articulate an intended future action
Very few child prodigies become world-class experts in that field
Asking for advice might be better than asking for feedback sometimes
Stress-is-enhancing mindset does not mean we should look for new stressful situations.
Mentors can be supportive and demanding at the same time.
team players don't necessarily have high IQ, but they have high RMET scores

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Talia Sacks
I want to express my profound appreciation for the incredible qualities you bring to our team. Your journey as a FGLI student from Brazil studying engineering adds a unique and valuable perspective to our collective experience. The resilience and determination you exhibit in navigating challenges inspire us all. Your commitment to excellence is not only reflected in your academics but also in the way you approach our team projects. You consistently go above and beyond, ensuring that every task is completed with meticulous detail and dedication. Your work ethic not only sets a high standard but also fosters a collaborative environment where everyone strives for their best. I admire the strength and cultural richness you bring to our team, making our collaborative endeavors not only successful but also deeply enriching. Turning to your Discovery project, your passion for video games came to life in a captivating and innovative way. Your decision to design your own video game, collaborating with a friend, showcased your ability to merge engineering expertise with creative pursuits. The thoroughness with which you approached this project was evident, reflecting your commitment to perfection. Your presentation skillfully conveyed both the technical intricacies and the artistic vision behind the game, highlighting the depth of your understanding in both realms. The fusion of your engineering background with your love for video games not only demonstrated your versatility but also hinted at the promising intersections of technology and creativity in your future endeavors.
Laura Baeyens
Yuka is someone that I really enjoyed getting to know over the course of the semester. The stories and experiences that she shared with the group about growing up in Brazil and trying to find a job in tech were really interesting to me. I appreciated learning from someone with experiences that were very different from my own. Yuka is someone who consciously made an effort everyday to ask me how I was doing with my classwork and applications, something that deeply touched me. She is also a very authentic and caring person. I enjoyed Yuka's presentation about her efforts to program video games a lot. Once again, this is an interest that is distinctly different from my own. Nonetheless, I enjoyed her excitement about what she was passionate. It was cool to see how she had been working on her skills to draw and plan games. I am certain that she is capable of anything that she can put her mind to.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.